Entertainment

STARVING ARTIST WANTS A COOKIE

MARLA Olmstead slaps paint on a canvas, smushes it in random shapes with her hands, and sells the re sult for $15,000. Quel genius! Marla is 4 years old.

This documentary about a tyke from Binghamton, N.Y., struggles to maintain a sober, evenhanded tone about an utterly ridiculous story. After the toddler’s paintings were exhibited in a local coffee shop, they attracted a gallery owner, a local newspaper report and finally a story in the New York Times. Suckers and their checkbooks came running, and Marla sold some $300,000 worth of paintings.

The opportunities for a satirical comedy are largely missed by filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev, who does a lot of first-person hand-wringing about his methods. That is both a distraction and an indication that he got a little too close to his subjects. Documentarians must be ruthless because they serve their audience, not their subjects.

Early on, it becomes clear that the film will have no resolution. Instead it will merely ask the same questions that were asked when Jackson Pollock first began tossing paint.

After the Times story, a “60 Minutes” report on the family gave extensive airtime to a psychologist who, after watching a video of the kid at work, thought that the random swirls and dollops were not entirely the work of Marla.

Her father Mark, it turns out, is a sometime painter; moreover, the gallery that ginned up sales for her is run by a guy who paints photo-realistic canvases and admits that he always wanted to stick it to the abstract expressionists. Although the “60 Minutes” psychologist was supplying a purely subjective opinion, Marla’s paintings immediately stopped selling.

Marla’s mother Laura, who earlier in the film is seen expressing misgivings about exposing her child to the spotlight even as she is booking her on national television, proclaimed herself relieved that the kid could now go back to a normal life – then began a vigorous p.r. campaign to rebuild the sales of the paintings.

An astute New York Times critic, Michael Kimmelman, lays out the obvious: that most people consider abstract art a con game. Of course it is; that which anyone can do, or create a near-replica of, is not art, and Pollock became famous simply because, like Marla, he was heavily promoted by a New York Times writer, Clement Greenberg. A certain number of people will believe anything the Times tells them.

A hoary debate turns more interesting when the film becomes an inquiry into whether Marla’s parents are lying about having helped her. Toward the end, there is some choice footage of the mother and father sitting side by side as Bar-Lev sheepishly asks them whether either of them helped the kid paint.

The mother, her gaze steady, says no and bursts into tears; the father’s glance shifts uneasily. When his wife says she wishes she could take a polygraph, his eyeballs pinball around his head as if he’s been told, “Let’s see your impression of Dick Nixon in the 1960 debate.”

Running time: 83 minutes. Rated PG-13 (profanity). At the Angelika, the Lincoln Plaza, others.